Google's low PUE from 10 data centers gets less media coverage than a Yahoo Chicken Coop and Facebook Open Compute DC

Chris Malone has a presentation at Uptime Symposium that DataCenterKnowledge covers Google's Data Center PUE status.

Google: No ‘Secret Sauce’ in Recipe for Efficiency

May 11th, 2011 : Rich Miller

A chart showing onoging improvement in Power Usage Effectiveness in data centers at Google.

Chris Malone didn’t come to the Uptime Symposium to reveal Google’s stealthy strategies to make its data centers super-efficient. Instead, Malone’s message was that no state secrets are required to make your facilities much more efficient – although perhaps not quite as efficient as Google’s highly-customized infrastructure.

There are ten data centers reported on starting 4 years ago. Yet, many data center novices are more aware of Yahoo's chicken coop and Facebook's Open Computer Data center., and think of these first data center build out as state of the art.

Yahoo’s Chicken Coop-Inspired Green Data Center

By Katie Fehrenbacher Sep. 19, 2010, 9:00pm PT Comments Off

Design inspiration can come from unusual places — for Yahoo and its data center design team, it was chicken coops, which utilize outside air and can reduce cooling power and costs. On Monday, Yahoo announced that the first data center to mimic this fine-feathered design has been built, commissioned and is up and running in Lockport, New York.

...

Facebook Open Sources Its Servers and Data Centers

By Stacey Higginbotham Apr. 7, 2011, 10:05am PT 20 Comments

Facebook has shared the nitty-gritty details of its server and data center design, taking its commitment to openness to a new level for the industry by sharing its infrastructure secrets much like it has shared its software code. The effort by the social network will bring web scale computing to the masses and is a boon for AMD and Intel and the x86 architecture.Sorry ARM.

Google is going to have its data center event in Zurich on May 24.  We'll see perception changes after Google's data center summit.

European Data Centre Summit 2011

Improving the energy efficiency of your data centre is a critical part of business best practices, ensuring the reduction of both your organisation's total energy consumption and its environmental impact.

The financial gains are potentially huge for infrastructures at any scale; whether you run a facility of a few hundred kWs or a multi-MW data centre, there are immediate steps you can take to deliver rapid environmental and economic returns.

Designing a Cloud Friendly Data Center, Jim Kennedy RagingWire & Peter Panfil Liebert

Considerations to think about in Cloud Data Centers is how Jim and Peter kicked off their presentation of what a cloud data center is.

Jim made an interesting point that RagingWire stopped using the Tier rating system in its data centers as it confused the users.  RagingWire's focus is illustrated in the following slide where redundancy of the entire eco-system is a requirement.

To create a cloud data center Jim makes the point that the data center needs to be more sensitive to the load being run.  And the last point made below is a difficult one - getting "DC infrastructure and IT operations to work together to solve this complex problem."

I just wrote about the separation between Facility Ops and IT, so I share many of the same views Jim and Peter are sharing.

Blue Collar vs. White Collar, understanding the separation between data center ops, IT, and business units

WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 2011 AT 7:08AM

I posted on the idea of a System Program Manager in the data center.  In the same conversation I referenced, my friend and I were discussing how different data center ops is versus IT, let alone the business units who don't get their hands dirty. Getting your hands dirty is viewed by many as beneath them.

After listening to Jim and Peter, I have a simple way to explain what a Cloud Data Center is ... The Cloud Data Center takes what is typically separate groups roles and integrates the individuals into a more efficient team.  A team to provide data center services so customers get better uptime and availability for a given cost.   How well the team functions has a direct relationship to how well the cloud data center runs.  Cloud is IaaS, PaaS, SaaS are integration of teams to provide a service.

How many data center problems occur because individuals don't communicate as much as they should?  All it takes is one individual's mistake to bring down the whole team.

Another example of where I am so glad I have my Verizon 4G Mifi device, Uptime's event network 0.21 Mbps speed in keynote

I am sitting in the Uptime Institute Symposium, and  wrote a blog entry on Facebook's Data Center Design.  The upload was an excruciating 3 minutes or more.  Curious I went to run www.speedtest.net twice and look at the download and upload speeds.

 

Switching to my Verizon 4G mifi modem.

Ahh, now I fill like I can breath.  Crawling at 210 Kbps may be fine for free, but way too painful to blog at an event.

Ready to write about

Designing a Cloud-Friendly Data Center
Peter Panfil
Vice President and General Manager, Liebert AC Power
James Kennedy
Director - Data Center Operations and Construction, RagingWire Enterprise Solution

Facebook's Latest Data Center Design presentation at Uptime

Facebook gave a keynote presentation on its Data Center Design

Facebook's Latest Innovations in Data Center Design
Senior Electrical Engineer, Facebook  Paul Hsu
Datacenter Mechanical Engineer, Facebook Dan Lee

Below is a side by side slide Paul presented on the difference between a typical data center power conversion vs. the Facebook design.

Dan has a slide with side-by-side comparison of a typical mechanical system vs. the Facebook design.

A couple of other slides share are on the Reactor Power Panel and Battery cabinet.

The results Facebook shared.

For more details you can find information at Facebook's Open Compute Project web site.

If you want to see pictures of inside the Facebook data center check out http://scobleizer.com/2011/04/16/photo-tour-of-facebooks-new-datacenter/ and http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/19/video-facebooks-penthouse-cooling-system/

Disrupting the Data Center, Uptime Institute focuses on Cloud, Cost, Capacity, and Carbon

Watching the initial keynotes for Uptime Institute it is great to see the Green Data Center idea manifest in the tag line of Cloud, Cost, Capacity and Carbon.

The keynote kicked off with the idea this the conference for the Disrupted Data Center which pulled together the groups of The 451 Group.

In the coming five years, a series of major technological innovations, coupled with significant, external legislative and market disruptions, will make an ever greater impression on the planning, design and operation of data centers. The economics, the operational practices and the underlying design principles of data centers, and of IT service provision, may be about to undergo some fundamental, disruptive shifts.

And, organizes the top underwriters of the conference.

But, then I ask the question is disruption of the data center come from the above list of companies.  Facebook is presenting part of its Open Compute project.

Open sourcing designs disruptive. 

As I spend the rest of my time at Uptime, I'll keep on thinking of what is disruptive in data centers.  Is Cloud, Cost, Capacity, and Carbon disruptive?  Or is it the companies who are not the underwriters list?